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Duncan v Becerra goes against California
PDF of 9th circuit appeal, Duncan v Becerra
https://cdn0.thetruthaboutguns.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/DuncanvBecerraOpinion.pdf
https://cdn0.thetruthaboutguns.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/brownells-cali.jpg
From Brownells:
In the wake of a ruling by a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Brownells has resumed selling its full lineup of rifle, pistol and shotgun magazines to California customers.
Known as Duncan vs Becerra, the case against California’s ban on standard-capacity magazines was brought by the California Rifle & Pistol Association.
The Ninth Circuit applied strict scrutiny in its decision and ruled firearm magazines, including those of 30-rounds capacity or more, are “protected arms under the Second Amendment.”
The entire ruling can be read at the United States Court of Appeals For the Ninth Circuit site.
Effective immediately, Brownells will once again ship magazines to California customers.
To see Brownells full lineup for popular magazines for AR-15 style, AK-47 style and other commonly-owned semi-automatic rifles and pistols, visit the magazine section of the Brownells website.
About Brownells
Serious About Firearms Since 1939™, Brownells is the world’s leading source for guns, gun parts and accessories, ammunition, gunsmithing tools and survival gear. With a large selection of both common and hard-to-find items, and an extensive collection of videos, articles, and gun schematics, Brownells is the expert for everything shooting-related. Committed to maintaining our great traditions, Brownells has more, does more and knows more – and guarantees it all, Forever. For more information or to place an order, call 800-741-0015 or visit Brownells.com. Stay up-to-date with Brownells on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
For the second time, California's restrictive laws over firearm magazines has been shot down. It is expected that a request for an en banc hearing will be filed soon, but that won't happen before firearms companies have sold a few boatloads of magazines to Californians.
I really think the tide has turned against gun control hoplophobes.
The appointment of federal judges is the single best reason to reelect Trump, IMHO. It's time to get rid of the fascists who want to leave all Americans defenseless against criminals and government. Ooops - sorry for the redundancy there.
Gun porn warning:
https://www.brownells.com/magazines/index.htm
Heat Shield Tiles on Starship, Installed With Robots
SpaceX installs orbital Starship heat shield prototype with robots
As with all SpaceX programs, the company began Starship heat shield installation development as soon as possible, installing a handful of tiles (presumably early-stage prototypes) on Starhopper as far back as H1 2019. This continued with small hexagonal tile installation tests on Starships SN1, SN3, SN4, SN5, and SN6 throughout 2020. While those coupon tests obviously didn’t involve orbital-class reentry heating or buffeting, they were still useful to characterize the mechanical behavior of heat shield tiles under the stress of cryogenic propellant loading, Raptor static fires, and hop tests.
In 2019, SpaceX even tested a few ceramic Starship heat shield tiles on an orbital Cargo Dragon mission for NASA. The fact that no more orbital Cargo or Crew Dragon tests were acknowledged seems to suggest that the demonstration was a success, proving that the tiles can stand up to the stresses of reentry from low Earth orbit (LEO).
Hopefully, this is just to speed up construction and not a sign that the tiles need to be removed and inspected after every launch.
Do Not Hold Grudges
‘Top Cop’ Kamala Harris’s Record of Policing the Police
As a leading contender to be Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s running mate, Ms. Harris has emerged as a strong voice on issues of police misconduct that seem certain to be central to the campaign. Yet in her own, unsuccessful presidential run, she struggled to reconcile her calls for reform with her record on these same issues during a long career in law enforcement.
Indeed, an examination of that record shows how Ms. Harris was far more reticent in another time of ferment a half-decade ago.
Since becoming California’s attorney general in 2011, she had largely avoided intervening in cases involving killings by the police. Protesters in Oakland distributed fliers saying: “Tell California Attorney General Kamala Harris to prosecute killer cops! It’s her job!”
Then, amid the national outrage stoked by the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., came pleas for her to investigate a series of police shootings in San Francisco, where she had previously been district attorney. She did not step in. Except in extraordinary circumstances, she said, it was not her job.
Still, her approach was subtly shifting. During the inaugural address for her second term as attorney general, Ms. Harris said the nation’s police forces faced a “crisis of confidence.” And by the end of her tenure in 2016, she had proposed a modest expansion of her office’s powers to investigate police misconduct, begun reviews of two municipal police departments and backed a Justice Department investigation in San Francisco.
Critics saw her taking baby steps when bold reform was needed — a microcosm of a career in which she developed a reputation for taking cautious, incremental action on criminal justice and, more often than not, yielding to the status quo.
[...] In her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime,” she wrote that “if we take a show of hands of those who would like to see more police officers on the street, mine would shoot up,” adding that “virtually all law-abiding citizens feel safer when they see officers walking a beat.”
Earlier this summer, in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, she told The New York Times that “it is status-quo thinking to believe that putting more police on the streets creates more safety. That’s wrong. It’s just wrong.”
How Kamala Harris Fought to Keep Nonviolent Prisoners Locked Up
Biden’s notes: ‘Do not hold grudges’ against Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris is clearly the official candidate of white guilt, but her pick is not going down well with at least some BLM supporters. The "cop" label isn't in vogue right now. It probably doesn't matter as the election will probably be a referendum on Trump's handling of the coronavirus and economy, possibly with an October surprise thrown in the mix.
Previously: Kamala Harris Endorses White Segregationist
Onyx Boox Poke2 Color eReader
Onyx Boox Poke2 Color eReader Launched for $299
Manga and comics fans, rejoice! After years of getting black & white eReaders, the first commercial color eReaders are coming to market starting with Onyx Boox Poke2 Color eReader sold for $299 (but sadly sold out at the time of writing).
The eReader comes with a 6-inch, 1448 x 1072 E-Ink display that supports up to 4096 colors, and runs Android 9.0 on an octa-core processor coupled with 2GB RAM and 32GB storage.
I think I would rather have an OLED/microLED tablet.
Getting Coronavirus Under Control in the US
Michael Osterholm and Neel Kashkari have an OpEd piece in Friday's (7 August 2020) New York Times.
These guys lay out an argument for more shelter-in-place activity as a mechanism to get the Coronavirus under control. They argue (and rightly so, IMHO) that the fastest way to get the economy going again is to take steps to reduce infections to a manageable level.
As the virus rages out of control through much of the US, people are less likely to put money into local businesses/economies or send their kids back to school. All of which will hamper any economic recovery.
The idea is that we need to get the virus under control, and only then start re-opening the economy.
Given how things have been going, I'm not sure how folks could arrive at a different conclusion.
I'm sure folks around here will disagree, and I expect we'll hear a lot about that disagreement. I wonder though, will we hear logical, fact-based arguments in disagreement? I guess we'll have to see.
Below is the text of the OpEd I mentioned, so you folks don't have to taint your browser caches with such a dirty, disgusting place as the New York Times. And you're welcome.
Here’s How to Crush the Virus Until Vaccines Arrive
To save lives, and save the economy, we need another lockdown.
In just weeks we could almost stop the viral fire that has swept across this country over the past six months and continues to rage out of control. It will require sacrifice but save many thousands of lives.
We believe the choice is clear. We can continue to allow the coronavirus to spread rapidly throughout the country or we can commit to a more restrictive lockdown, state by state, for up to six weeks to crush the spread of the virus to less than one new case per 100,000 people per day.
That’s the point at which we will be able to limit the increase in new cases through aggressive public health measures, just as other countries have done. But we’re a long way from there right now.
The imperative for this is clear because as a nation what we have done so far hasn’t worked. Some 160,000 people have died, and in recent days, roughly a thousand have died a day. An estimated 30 million Americans are collecting unemployment.
On Jan. 30, when the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a public health emergency, there were 9,439 reported cases worldwide, most in China, and only six reported cases in the United States.
On July 30, six months later, there were 17 million cases reported worldwide, including 676,000 deaths. The United States had four million reported cases and 155,000 deaths. More than a third of all U.S. cases occurred during July alone.
And the next six months could make what we have experienced so far seem like just a warm-up to a greater catastrophe. With many schools and colleges starting, stores and businesses reopening, and the beginning of the indoor heating season, new case numbers will grow quickly.
Why did the United States’ Covid-19 containment response fail, particularly compared with the successful results of so many nations in Asia, Europe and even our neighbor Canada?
Simply, we gave up on our lockdown efforts to control virus transmission well before the virus was under control. Many other countries didn’t let up until the number of cases was greatly reduced, even in places that had extensive outbreaks in March and April. Once the number of new cases in those areas was driven to less than one per 100,000 people per day as a result of their lockdowns, limiting the increase of new cases was possible with a combination of testing, contact tracing, case isolation and extensive monitoring of positive tests.
The United States recorded its lowest seven-day average since March 31 on May 28, when it was 21,000 cases, or 6.4 new cases per 100,000 people per day. This rate was seven to 10 times higher than the rates in countries that successfully contained their new infections. While many countries are now experiencing modest flare-ups of the virus, their case loads are in the hundreds or low thousands of infections per day, not tens of thousands, and small enough that public health officials can largely control the spread.
In contrast, the United States reopened too quickly and is now experiencing around 50,000 or more new cases per day.
While cases are falling in the hard-hit areas of Arizona, California, Florida and Texas because of the imposition of some physical-distancing measures, they are rapidly increasing in a few of Midwestern states. In Minnesota, we just documented the most new cases in a one-week period since the pandemic began.
At this level of national cases — 17 new cases per 100,000 people per day — we simply don’t have the public health tools to bring the pandemic under control. Our testing capacity is overwhelmed in many areas, resulting in delays that make contact tracing and other measures to control the virus virtually impossible.
Don’t confuse short-term case reductions in some states as permanent. We made that mistake before. Some have claimed that the widespread use of masks is enough to control the pandemic, but let us face reality: Gov. Gavin Newsom of California issued a public masking mandate on June 18, a day when 3,700 cases were reported in the state. On July 25, the seven-day daily case average was 10,231. We support the wearing of masks by all Americans, but masking mandates and soft limitations on indoor crowds in places such as bars and restaurants are not enough to control this pandemic.
To successfully drive down our case rate to less than one per 100,000 people per day, we should mandate sheltering in place for everyone but the truly essential workers. By that, we mean people must stay at home and leave only for essential reasons: food shopping and visits to doctors and pharmacies while wearing masks and washing hands frequently. According to the Economic Policy Institute, 39 percent of workers in the United States are in essential categories. The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential. To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.
If we aren’t willing to take this action, millions more cases with many more deaths are likely before a vaccine might be available. In addition, the economic recovery will be much slower, with far more business failures and high unemployment for the next year or two. The path of the virus will determine the path of the economy. There won’t be a robust economic recovery until we get control of the virus.
If we do this aggressively, the testing and tracing capacity we’ve built will support reopening the economy as other countries have done, allow children to go back to school and citizens to vote in person in November. All of this will lead to a stronger, faster economic recovery, moving people from unemployment to work.
We know that a stringent lockdown can have serious health consequences for patients who can’t get access to routine care. But over the past six months, medical professionals have learned how to protect patients and staffs from spreading the coronavirus; therefore we should be able to maintain access to regular medical care during any new lockdown.
This pandemic is deeply unfair. Millions of low-wage, front-line service workers have lost their jobs or been put in harm’s way, while most higher-wage, white-collar workers have been spared. But it is even more unfair than that; those of us who’ve kept our jobs are actually saving more money because we aren’t going out to restaurants or movies, or on vacations. Unlike in prior recessions, remarkably, the personal savings rate has soared to 20 percent from around 8 percent in January.
Because we are saving more, we have the resources to support those who have been laid off. Typically when the government runs deficits, it must rely on foreign investors to buy the debt because Americans aren’t generating enough savings to fund it. But we can finance the added deficits for Covid-19 relief from our own domestic savings. Those savings end up funding investment in the economy. That’s why traditional concerns about racking up too much government debt do not apply in this situation. It is much safer for a country to fund its deficits domestically than from abroad.
Congress should be aggressive in supporting people who’ve lost jobs because of Covid-19. It’s not only the right thing to do but also vital for our economic recovery. If people can’t pay their bills, it will ripple through the economy and make the downturn much worse, with many more bankruptcies, and the national recovery much slower.
There is no trade-off between health and the economy. Both require aggressively getting control of the virus. History will judge us harshly if we miss this life- and economy-saving opportunity to get it right this time.
Raspberry Pi Trading Releases Japanese Keyboard Variant
Raspberry Pi Release Japanese Keyboard Variant
The Japanese keyboard is the latest layout available. Last month we saw the release of Swedish, Portuguese, Danish and Norwegian layouts of the official keyboard.
WHEEL REINVENTED:
Simon Martin, Senior Principal Engineer at Raspberry Pi Trading explains some of the challenges they faced “We ended up reverse-engineering generic Japanese keyboards to see how they work, and mapping the keycodes to key matrix locations. We are fortunate that we have a very patient keyboard IC vendor, called Holtek, which produces the custom firmware for the controller.”
The Shoe Finally Drops on the NRA
So yes, the lawsuits and their timing — heading into the fall election for which the NRA had just pledged to spend “tens of millions” in the Trump reelection effort — were transparent political attacks aimed at both Trump and the nation’s most prominent supporter of gun rights.
But that doesn’t mean that what’s being alleged by James (or Racine) in her lawsuit isn’t true. She’s alleging wrongdoing by LaPierre, NRA corporate counsel and secretary John Frazer, retired CFO Wilson Phillips, and the NRA’s embattled former COO, Josh Powell. James’s suit asks for the four to be fined and reimburse millions they allegedly wrongfully received.
So for all of our readers who reacted by dismissing this as another prominent Democrat using her office to attack the NRA and, by extension, gun owners and gun rights, we would only remind you that both things can be true. The lawsuit(s) can be both a conveniently timed political hit job and justifiable on the merits based on actual, verifiable wrongdoing.
That pretty much sums everything up, I believe. Many of us have been watching the NRA trainwreck unfold. Just like watching a real life train wreck, you can see it, but you can do NOTHING to help. Here it comes, rolling along, helter skelter all over the landscape. The best you can do, is to get the hell out of the way before it rolls over you.
loaded question
Jimmy Dore: Yeah, I mean, everybody's behind that goal. Like I said, if it was 75 to 74, if it was even 80 to 70, these are overwhelming... there doesn't seem to be any light at the tunnel... at the end of the tunnel and the train is going full speed. So we're heading for a crash. Right now they're getting ready to kick 27 million people out of their houses, while also not giving them healthcare, while also not giving them a UBI or extending their unemployment or anything, and that's coming from the top of the party. There's no one inside the party in congress who will even push back against this a little. Bernie Sanders will not call out Chuck Schumer. He will not call out Nanci Pelosi. In fact Bernie Sanders voted for the biggest upward transfer of wealth in the history of human kind and then he lied about what he did. So, 96 to nothing, when do you start realizing this is a failed strategy, Brent? I mean I love you and I loved your work, and I think it's great that you're exposing their corruption. But this is a fool's errand. You knew what the... result of this thing was going to be before you went there. It's NUTS what's going on. And you know the only way... there's... this doesn't make any sense. What is the success rate? Zero. We're going backwards. Hillary Clinton offered us 50 and over for medicare, Joe Biden won't even give us 55. We're going backwards. So if you hate Trump and you hate right wingers and fascism, we're going to get a worse one in four years. It's not going away. Joe Biden and Barack Obama made it possible for Donald Trump to send... goons into Portland and arrest them and throw them in rented vans. Barack Obama signed section 1021 of the NDAA. He knew what he was doing. The ACLU knew what he was doing. I knew what he was doing at the time, so did Glenn Greenwald and everybody else. Here we are and nobody's talking about it. This party is not a party. The people want it to be a party but it's not. This is an organization setup by rapacious oligarchs to screw you. So what the Democratic party is, is the car in front of the ambulance that won't get out of the fucking way. Because everybody knows we want medicare for all and a UBI and debt relief, and mortgage relief and they won't goddamn do it. They're the ones stopping it. Nanci Pelosi was the one who stopped the UBI. Nanci Pelosi was the one who wanted to means test every goddamn thing they gave to working people, as she funneled 5 trillion dollars upward to her husband. That's what's going on in this party. This is not a political party, as much as you want it to be. So what is your strategy going forward?
Brent Welder: You know, and we haven't even started talking about superdelegates...
NY Att'y Gen. Moves To Dissolve The NRA
New York Attorney General Moves To Dissolve The NRA After Fraud Investigation
August 6, 202011:35 AM ET
The attorney general of New York took action Thursday to dissolve the National Rifle Association following an 18-month investigation that found evidence the powerful gun rights group is "fraught with fraud and abuse."
Attorney General Letitia James claims in a lawsuit filed Thursday that she found financial misconduct in the millions of dollars and that it contributed to a loss of more than $64 million over a three-year period.
The suit alleges that top NRA executives misused charitable funds for personal gain, awarded contracts to friends and family members, and provided contracts to former employees to ensure loyalty.
Am I missing something? I thought that "misused charitable funds for personal gain" was now the in thing? I mean, look to the president as our fine example.
Without the NRA, who will lobby for the right to keep bare arms?
It seemed appropriate to set the Topic to Hardware. The NRA may not be soluble in water.
Some of my perfectly good jokes will have to be rewritten!
I Do Solemnly Swear...
(or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservations or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office upon which I am about to enter; So help me God.
For those of you who are unaware, the above is the oath taken by US military officers.
What *might* happen if the enemy "foreign or domestic" is the Commander in Chief of the US armed forces?
This is a relevant topic given that the individual currently in that position has, several times, threatened using the Insurrection Act in a cravenly political and partisan fashion, will not commit to accepting the results of the next election, and has repeatedly attempted to claim authority far beyond what his office provides.
Robert Taylor over at the Lawfare blog weighed in on what contingencies the military should plan for, should the current occupant of the White Hose attempt to issue unconstitutional orders to keep himself in power.
Note that I'm not claiming that *will* happen, nor am I claiming that the military is the only part of the government that can address such issues.
But I'm curious what Soylentils think about how the nation (the military, the courts, Congress and the public) could/should/would respond to such a constitutional crisis.
I fully expect the trolls and Trump cock gobblers to go full-on authoritarian and/or ridiculous bullshit here, and the QAnon morons will chime in too.
That said, I hope we can also have an interesting discussion about these potential issues and how they might be addressed.
Text of Robert Taylor's Essay:
Contingency Planning for Presidential Interference with the Election
One of the great strengths of the U.S. military is its planning, encompassing contingencies big and small. With sadness, I urge my former colleagues in the military services and at the Department of Defense level to plan now for the possibility of actions by the president to disrupt the forthcoming election or even to vitiate the election results. It is distressing that we have come to this point, where strategic planners must prepare for serious threats to our democracy from the president of the United States, and where the military must be prepared—better prepared than recent events have shown it to be at present—to avoid becoming an instrument of the demise of the great American experiment in democracy and the long and uneven march to a just society.
After the initial trickle of military voices decrying the president’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act to send the military into our cities becoming a powerful stream, it seems likely that the president and his enablers have abandoned—at least for now—thoughts of invoking the Insurrection Act.
But the president and his enablers have found another way of usurping local and state control over law enforcement. They’ve sent first to Portland and now to Chicago, Albuquerque and other “Democrat-run cities” personnel from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ostensibly to protect federal facilities. The protection of federal facilities is a legitimate mission of DHS, but the DHS personnel have been deployed away from federal facilities, and have disrupted, detained, and intimidated protesters, whether they were approaching a federal facility or not. The president has even intimated that the federal agents have been directed to protect monuments in which the federal government has no legitimate interest. The DHS personnel are federal law enforcement personnel, unlike members of the military. But they are dressed in camouflage uniforms, and their presence in the streets of Portland and elsewhere seems calculated to suggest a military operation. The presence of federal officers in Portland has done nothing to bring peace to the streets and seems intended to perpetuate and deepen disruptions.
This usurpation of local policing powers comes as the president’s abysmal performance of genuine federal responsibilities has led to cratering polling results and, most ominously, the president’s incessant drumbeat of attacks on the integrity of the forthcoming election. The president has refused to say that he would accept the results of that election, if he did not win, and he has even raised the prospect of postponing the election. Before the 2016 election, Mr. Trump also made statements refusing to commit to accepting the election results—as reckless and irresponsible as those statements were, he wielded no power at the time. Today, he is the president of the United States, wielding enormous power. This makes his statement a genuine threat to the rule of law and to the nation’s life as a democracy. The deployment of DHS officers has the flavor of a dress rehearsal for actions to disrupt and distort the upcoming election.
The military, sadly, must plan how to respond if the president attempts to wield the power of the presidency to thwart the electoral process, whether through the Insurrection Act or through other means.
Each military member, and every federal official, swears to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Under the Constitution, all “executive and judicial officers” of the United States and of the states likewise must take an oath or affirmation to support the Constitution. The president’s possible abuse of office to prevent his losing the election (both before and after the date of the election itself) would put such oaths to the test in ways that are completely unprecedented.
How can today’s military members stay true to their oaths, and support and defend the Constitution?
First, we must look to our senior-most political leadership, especially Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. He has a critically important role, and he needs to be aware that the judgment of history will be focused on him. He must make it clear that the department will not carry out illegal orders, no matter what the president says. He has done this before, when he stated at a Pentagon briefing that the military would follow the rules of armed conflict and not attack cultural sites with no military value, despite the President’s threat to do so in Iran a few days previous. Making it clear that the military is a creature of law is a vital foundation for the support and defense of our Constitution.
Likewise, it is critical for senior military leaders—like the chairman of the joint chiefs, the chiefs of staff of the military branches and the combatant commanders—to reiterate that their loyalty is to the Constitution and to the nation, and not to any particular individual.
What is an illegal order will sometimes be clear—for example, if Trump attempts to prevent the electors selected in the various states from meeting and voting, or if he attempts to prevent the Congress from receiving the votes of the electors, military members would clearly be obligated to disobey any order to effectuate his purpose. And if Trump refused to leave the White House, as soon as his term is over the military would be obligated to disregard any order purportedly issued by Trump. An order to delay the elections, which the president has no authority to issue, would likewise have to be ignored.
But as the controversy over the president’s consideration of invoking the Insurrection Act showed, it is not always clear what an illegal order is. In the case of the Insurrection Act, the ability of the president to send in troops in the absence of a request from a state’s governor depends on questions of degree and judgment. More precisely, it hinges on whether the “domestic violence” occurring in cities across the country
so hinders the execution of the laws of that State … that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection …
The president might assert, without factual basis, that lawlessness and chaos meet this standard. But even if there were unusual violence, if that unlawful behavior is not directed at a particular “part or class” of people to “deprive[] [them] of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law,” the statute should not be read to provide authority. In the current situation, there are certainly law enforcement challenges, but there is not the kind of rampant lawlessness and chaos for which this provision of the Insurrection Act is intended. And there is no indication that a “part or class” of people is being deprived of their constitutional rights in any sort of general or systematic manner. Drawing the line between an organized effort to intimidate and subjugate a “part or class” of people to deny them their constitutional rights (think about Mississippi Burning in the mid-1960s) and random violence requires the exercise of some judgment. But when a blatantly unconstitutional motive—targeting the political opposition through force and violence—is proclaimed by the President, the task of determining the unlawfulness of such behavior becomes easier.
To be sure, judgment under the Insurrection Act, in the first instance, is to be exercised by the president. That it is a matter of judgment for the president is not the same thing as saying anything goes. There is a legal standard, and if that legal standard is not met there is no power. Allowing the president to be the final arbiter of whether the legal standard is met would eviscerate the constraints of law on the power of the president. Total deference to the president would not preserve the separation of powers, it would destroy it, rendering the Congress’s lawmaking role a mere chimera. The closer we get to the election—the ultimate check on the president’s authority, with free and fair elections being the very heart of what it means to be a democracy—the more searing should be the review of the president’s exercise of judgment. This is true for the courts, but it is also true for the Department of Defense and our military—and indeed for all officers, state, federal and local, who have sworn to uphold the Constitution.
Should the president issue an order for troops to deploy to the streets of Milwaukee in the weeks before the election, for example, personnel throughout the federal government should evaluate that order in the context of the president’s persistent attacks on the integrity of the electoral process, and his recent suggestion that the election should be postponed. Examined in that context, there is an obvious danger that any finding by the president that the predicate for deployment under the Insurrection Act has been met would be a disingenuous pretext for an effort to stifle voter turnout in a “Democrat city” so as to gain the electoral votes of the state.
The entire chain of command, from the secretary of defense on down, must be prepared to exercise judgment and refuse to carry out a pretextual, and thus illegal, order. Similar concerns may arise, for other officials at the state and federal level, with respect to the president’s possible use of other authority for the unlawful purpose to disrupt or delay the election. And our courts, including the Supreme Court, must take the uncomfortable step of being willing to exercise judgment to uphold our constitutional commitment to choosing our presidents through elections, not force.
The nation’s life as a democracy hangs in the balance.
